# Understanding oscillating behaviour when using Q-learning on cart-pole problem

I am fairly new to RL and have been using OpenAI Gym to try implementing a few algorithms I've been learning about.

I've just been trying to get Q-learning working on the cart-pole environment using linear function approximation and I got the following behaviour:

My first thought was that the learning rate is too high and the gradient descent step is overshooting the optimum parameters but when I knocked it down it basically just stretched this graph in the x direction (i.e. it just took a lot longer to do better than 20 and then started oscillating).

My code (88 lines, just python + numpy) is here but here's the basic idea of what I think I'm doing mathematically:

• At each timestep $$t$$ we are in state $$S_t$$ and choose action $$A_t$$ according to parameters $$\theta_t$$.

• The features I am using for the linear approximation of $$Q(s, a)$$ are denoted by $$\phi(s, a)$$.

• There are two actions 0 and 1. We define $$\phi(s, 0) = [s, 0, \cdots, 0]^T$$ and $$\phi(s, 1) = [0, \cdots, 0, s]^T$$. I'm a bit suspicious about whether this is a good idea...

• We can then define our linear approximation according to some parameters $$\theta$$ as $$\hat{Q}(s,a,\theta)=\theta^T\phi(s,a)$$.

• We then do:

• Perform $$A_t$$ and observe new state $$S_{t+1}$$ and receive reward $$R_{t+1}$$.
• Calculate $$A^*_{t+1}=\text{argmax}_a\hat{Q}(S_{t+1}, a, \theta_t)$$ the action we believe is best according to $$\hat{Q}$$.
• Update $$\theta$$ using SGD: \begin{align*} \theta_{t+1}&=\theta_t+\alpha\left[R_{t+1}+\gamma\hat{Q}(S_{t+1}, A^*_{t+1}, \theta_t)-\hat{Q}(S_t,A_t, \theta_t)\right]\nabla_\theta\hat{Q}(S_t,A_t,\theta_t)\\ &=\theta_t+\alpha\left[R_{t+1}+\gamma\hat{Q}(S_{t+1}, A^*_{t+1}, \theta_t)-\hat{Q}(S_t,A_t, \theta_t)\right]\phi(S_t, A_t) \end{align*}
• Finally decide on whether the next action $$A_{t+1}$$ will be $$A^*_{t+1}$$ or some random action ($$\epsilon$$-greedy).

My best guess is that something is wrong with my theta update rather than it just being a matter of tuning hyperparameters. This is partially since I've spent a while trying different hyperparameters and also because when I tried modifying the code to use experience replay it didn't seem to get anywhere at all...

I don't believe your features can work. Disregarding your encoding of the action, you are simply using a linear function of the state to learn the value. The state given by OpenAI gym are positions and velocity. The ideal value function (V) would be symmetric around 0 for theta which a linear function cannot represent. Tile coding or RBF features would work for Cartpole.

• I've just started using some simple tile coding features and I'm getting much better results already! – Bridgo Dec 14 '16 at 18:54

I want to clarify that in cartpole (and in gym's cartpole in particular), it is definitely possible to succeed with a linear Q function approximator. For example, taking s = [cart_pos, cart_vel, pole_pos, pole_vel] as in gym, try:

Q(s,0) = -s[3] - 3*s[2]
Q(s,1) = s[3] + 3*s[2]


That will balance the pole for the required 200 time steps. To be clear, this isn't learning anything, but I regularly hear people say that cartpole can't be run with a linear Q function, so I wanted to point out this solution.

• Such a Q-function does indeed happen to result in a strong policy, but it is not an accurate Q-function (it does not accurately predict values). So, any value-based learning algorithm (Q-learning, Sarsa, etc.) would observe errors and move away even if it were initialized with such functions. – Dennis Soemers Sep 21 '18 at 10:29